


A Failed Lesson on Astronomy

by curious_eye



Series: Life Lessons [2]
Category: Space Force (TV)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Stargazing, That's literally all this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:54:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25346566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curious_eye/pseuds/curious_eye
Summary: Tony and Chan try to stargaze in Tony's backyard. They don’t have a rug and only one of them knows anything about stars.Based on one of the events referenced in A Poorly Judged Lesson on Diversity but so loosely related to it that you probably don't need to read that first.
Relationships: Chan Kaifang/F. Tony Scarapiducci
Series: Life Lessons [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1835575
Comments: 12
Kudos: 30





	A Failed Lesson on Astronomy

**Author's Note:**

> This is the result of me hitting a brick wall with the next longer thing I want to write (seriously, making an outline into an actual story with what will probably become a way too elaborate plot for the weird idea it started as is a struggle :0 ). But it seems that I write things like this when that happens now...
> 
> Also I called this mature because I have very very tentatively attempted it XD I’m sure by most people's standards it’s very tame but, hey, I’m an awkward person :)

For all of his overstated traits and outspoken millennialism, Chan had expected Tony’s house to be the inanimate version of its owner: a metropolitan, minimalist oasis (if you liked that sort of thing) amongst the dusty, rural houses of Wild Horse.

What he found instead was a smaller, more cluttered house which shared more of a resemblance to his own than the immaculate, unrealistic ideals of an interior design magazine. Not that Tony didn’t have a certain flair; the walls were adorned with posters, some abstract and others just adverts for his eclectic taste in media. There were rugs covering the plain wooden floor in most of the rooms Chan had seen so far, the one beneath his feet geometric and loud in its pattern. He watched Tony continue to dig through a cupboard that he clearly used to hide away all of his junk without ever sorting through it.

“I’m sure there’s a rug in here somewhere,” his voice floated over his shoulder, muffled to Chan’s ears but holding an audible energy that made him smile unabashedly – a luxury he would allow himself until Tony turned around. He ducked his head towards the floor, looking again at the blocky colours, his brain, tired from another day at work, finally making some connections.

“There’s a rug under my feet,” he retorted, “And at least one in almost every other room. So can you please tell me why you’re buried in a cupboard.” Tony’s head emerged from said cupboard, his hair tousled from the speed at which he turned to face Chan.

“That’s an _indoor_ rug,” he emphasised slowly, holding one hand up in disbelief as he often did when Chan said something that was apparently ridiculous. _You’re meant to be clever_ ; a comment that was thrown around frequently was easily tempered by Chan’s assertion that scientists could be intelligent but completely lacking in common sense. “And it would ruin the surprise if I told you.”

“Oh, so this is a one-upping event?” Chan asked, leaning against the back of the sofa with a forcibly mustered patience, amusing himself with the sight of Tony who returned to his search.

“Probably not,” Tony muttered, exclaiming gleefully a moment later. “Found it!” He wheeled back around, brandishing a piece of material that Chan could just about imagine existing as a rug one day far in the past. Tony had returned to his question without noticing the bedraggled state of the fabric. “I can hardly one up myself, can I? It is _your_ turn to perform a grand gesture at the moment.” Chan nodded vaguely, conceding the point and then gesturing to the rug.

“I don’t think that’s going to do much.”

Tony followed his pointing finger, face falling at the moth-eaten, slightly shredded material in his hand and then dropping it to the floor with a wrinkled nose.

“It’s that or the ground,” he said, restoring himself to full-strength positivity effortlessly. Chan exchanged a look with him for a moment, grinning when he held out a hand. “The ground it is, then.” Chan allowed himself to be pulled towards the back door, trying not to grip too tight to the fingers that interlocked with his own, simultaneously warmed by the feeling of their palms pressed together and tempted to chase the sensation as far as he could.

“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing?” He asked again, letting Tony disentangle their hands and push him out of the door first. He heard the back door shut behind Tony, feeling a presence against his back moments later, Tony’s head resting against his own, his arms wrapping around Chan’s waist.

“Stargazing,” he announced proudly. Chan made a show of nodding deeply, as if the idea was profound.

“That would have been a contender for the game, man,” he said after a moment, “You’re really wasting it when it’s not your go?” Tony hummed in agreement against his ear, the sound a soft rumble through his bones.

“Our game aside, I like to play one of my own occasionally and it involves enticing unsuspecting scientists to my home and drawing them in with the most romantic, vaguely science related activities I can think of,” Tony continued to talk from over his shoulder, the heat of his exhalations warming Chan’s cheek against the cool evening. He tilted his head back to rest against Tony’s front, looking up to seek out Tony’s gaze behind him.

“And how does that game end?” He asked teasingly. Tony grinned, tugging him around so they were facing each other, close in the small yard.

“You’ll have to wait and see,” he murmured, raising his eyebrows conspiratorially and entirely ruining the more sinister angle he was clearly going for. Chan rolled his eyes fondly, a single movement to close the distance between them erasing these thoughts from his head. Tony’s hands rested on his shoulders, another source of heat that counterintuitively resulted in goosebumps prickling his skin.

“We don’t have time for this,” Tony announced, pulling away after far too long for his argument to be convincing. “It might get cloudy.”

“It probably won’t,” Chan retorted, allowing himself to be tugged down to the hard ground nonetheless. “The forecast was clear for tonight.” Tony looked ready to make a comment about him researching the weather forecast for fun but wrapped an arm around his shoulder instead, the fond gesture saying far more.

Chan rested his head on Tony's shoulder, finding it easy to ignore the seeping coldness of the dusty floor beneath them and losing himself in the steady rise and fall of their shoulders, breaths aligning into a shared pattern. If he closed his eyes, they weren’t on a small patch of uncomfortable concrete in the underwhelming setting of Wild Horse. They could be anywhere; on a hill with grass beneath them and a tree to obscure the crisp and clear moonlight, perhaps.

“You won’t see anything if you keep your eyes closed,” Tony interrupted his fantasy impatiently, a smile ready for when Chan returned to reality.

“You’re warm,” he murmured, stifling a yawn in the other man’s shoulder. Tony let him sit like that for a moment before the boundless energy was back, his finger repeatedly poking Chan’s arm.

“Come on,” he said impatiently, throwing himself backwards to lie on the concrete beneath them as if it was a mattress that would break his fall. Chan rolled his eyes at the momentarily pained expression that crossed his face. “You teach Ali about astrobotany, right?”

“Yeah,” Chan replied, shifting to lie next to him. In the distance a car alarm broke the stillness, taking what little mood had been left with it. Chan found himself not minding that at all, happy to watch Tony stare up at the sky with the sort of enthusiasm he’d had the first time his dad had dusted off an old telescope from the attic. “What’s Captain Ali got to do with this?”

“I hear you’re an impatient, angry teacher,” Tony reported gleefully, tearing his eyes away from the sky and tilting his head to face Chan. “It was a well-known initiation ritual for new teachers at my school to be forced to try and deal with me for a term of their class-”

“You must have been insufferable as a child,” Chan interjected, grinning at Tony’s offended reaction.

“Anyway,” he continued, talking faster and louder to stop Chan from interrupting, “It only seems fair that you are put to the test and if you pass, Angela will be forced to admit that you are, in fact, a great teacher. So…”

“So what?” Chan asked patiently, not even mentioning that Ali would never once in her life be caught complimenting his abrupt teaching style. Tony waved towards the sky, his gaze moving back in that direction.

“Teach me something.”

“About constellations?” Chan asked, mildly surprised when Tony’s head shifted against the ground in a gesture that just about looked like a nod. “Okay, so you see the really bright star?” He felt Tony shuffling again; the heat from his body, although steadily being drained by the cold ground beneath them, was suddenly closer as he craned his neck to follow Chan’s outstretched finger.

“That one?” He asked, his arm lifting to be alongside Chan’s, close enough that they were almost brushing. If there had been a rug, if they hadn’t been lying in his less than tidy backyard, if that car alarm hadn’t been whining in the background it would have been like a scene in one of those cliché films that Chan hated every second of. If he’d been lying on the floor with anyone else, his hand would have dropped and he’d have been shuffling away (in truth, if anyone else had asked him to stargaze in the first place he would have outright refused). But because it was Tony he hummed in agreement and kept talking.

“That’s Polaris, the North Star. And if you follow it diagonally there’s three stars in a line and then, like, a square of stars. That’s the Little Dipper. Now, if you go back to the North Star and follow it down and left a bit, you should see a bigger square and that’s got a kind of handle too. That’s the Big Dipper. Can you see it?”

“No.”

An unexpected laugh forced itself out of Chan, making his outreached hand drop to hold his chest. Tony was grinning faintly when he glanced back over, eyes still screwed up and darting backwards and forwards across the sky.

“I don’t want to lower the tone,” he continued suddenly, “But a little star blob with a tail kinda sounds like-”

“Yeah, don’t lower the tone,” Chan interrupted, exhaling another laugh as Tony looked insistent.

“I’m just saying…”

“Oh, I know exactly what you’re saying.” Chan waited knowingly in the silence that followed, not needing to look over to picture Tony’s mouth opening and shutting as he lost the uphill battle with himself to stop talking.

“But do you think they decided it would be tasteless to call them the Big Sperm and the Little Sperm?”

“Tony!” Chan covered his face with one hand, reaching the other over to blindly swat the other man. He kept staring at the darkness that his arm had created in front of his eyes, listening to Tony’s breaths as he laughed quietly to himself.

“It was a genuine question,” he murmured a minute later, serious expression cracking once more when Chan removed the hand from his face to level a stare in his direction.

They gave up on trying to spot real constellations after that. Chan forgot about the uncomfortable ground and the gentle breeze, trying to wrap his head around the shapes Tony could pick out in the sky. It seemed that, given his inability to find the genuine ones, Tony turned into a child doing their own version of cloud spotting.

“So you’re saying if you connect that one, that one-” It was Chan’s turn to misunderstand, allowing Tony’s hand to wrap around his wrist, moving his finger slightly to the right.

“No not that one, _that_ one.” Tony’s correction didn’t help Chan in the slightest but he decided to humour the other man, beginning to feel the cold night air break through the bubble they’d had around themselves for some time.

“Fine. And it looks like what?”

“The twitter logo,” Tony replied exasperatedly, as if this should have been obvious. Even if he had kept track of the many stars he’d included in his makeshift constellation, Chan couldn’t see this being true.

“ _Tony_ , seriously?” He said in despair. “You could have just said a bird.” Tony scoffed, shaking his head, fingers still wrapped around Chan’s hand. 

“But it’s not just any bird. See, that’s the wing…” He waved Chan’s arm up and down, tracing the same shape over and over. Chan tried to follow the movement of his own finger, swiftly finding the shape he was supposedly drawing totally incomprehensible.

“If you say so,” he conceded instead, letting his head rock to one side again so he could see Tony in the low light of the backyard. He’d moved similarly, leaving them closer than before and even though Chan’s arm had dropped back down, Tony’s fingers continued to press against the drumming of his pulse, its pace no doubt embarrassingly quick.

He let Tony give him one of those indecipherable looks; the soft at the edges but still somehow firm ones that did something strange to his stomach that he’d never entirely felt before. Not that he’d admit this – Tony didn’t need telling that he was a pioneer in any department.

He also didn’t need a great deal of encouragement, shuffling even closer over the concrete and seeming to deflate with some weird sort of relief as he kissed Chan. Chan extracted his wrist from his grasp, brushing a hand up his arm and then cupping the back of his head. It was everything it had been before, everything that had been encapsulated in his gaze; soft at the edges but still somehow firm.

Tony had lost his blazer and tie at the door, his shirt sleeves rolled up and buttoned at his elbows despite the chilling breeze. Chan could feel his goosebumps beneath his fingertips as he rolled himself over, closing Chan in between his body and the ground as he hovered above him.

“I’m so glad Naird tried to use my own plan against me,” he murmured, withdrawing but only so far as to fiddle with Chan’s glasses, setting them straight on his nose.

“Good to know that you think about the general whilst kissing me on the floor,” Chan retorted faintly, stretching upwards to meet Tony halfway, the two of them moving back down as one. Not that he’d spent a great deal of time thinking about it, but Chan had always expected Tony to approach everything with the same frantic energy. Sometimes he liked to think this slower side to Tony was his way of saying that this was different, that there was something between them that worth waiting around for. Occasionally he thought Tony was as scared of messing up as he was but there was always a chance he was analysing things too much. It was an occupational hazard, he supposed.

Tony’s mouth had drifted a little, their noses brushing as he plotted a meandering trail across Chan’s face, one that frequently doubled back to his mouth. Chan felt his hands moving at his sides, reaching around to Tony’s back and slipping beneath his shirt. Tony shivered at the sensation, making Chan grin against his matching smile.

“Your hands are cold,” Tony whispered, his breath a contrasting heat. Chan smirked, his own sense of achievement dulled by the sudden ache that made his back arch.

“I’m beginning to wish we used that rubbish rug,” he complained plaintively. Tony’s answering smile was tinged with a mischievously wicked edge, his head ducking down one more time to meet Chan’s.

“Inside?” He suggested, moving away and back to Chan’s side. Chan pushed himself upright, wrapping his arms around himself against the low temperature that Tony’s body had been shielding him from. Tony was propped up on his elbows, eyes resting on him with almost enough heat to make the early autumn night feel like a summer afternoon. Despite this, Chan nodded.

After all, they’d already established that there were plenty of _indoor_ rugs.

**Author's Note:**

> P.S. to anyone who thinks writing fan fiction is not educational, I learnt that sperm was discovered before they named the Big Dipper today and that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been writing this XD
> 
> (My search history gets weird when I’m writing)


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